posted at 9:17 am on March 19, 2007 by Allahpundit

The segment ran 25 minutes, and I swear, Pelley had this look on his face the whole time:

The full interview is viewable in the sidebar at CBSNews.com. Given how this appearance was being touted on their website, Wuterich’s defenders were obviously hoping this would be his chance to win in the court of the public opinion before the case went to trial. Pelley had other ideas. Here’s 90 seconds of his questions that should get you hungry to watch the whole thing.

The clip’s been heavily edited, needless to say.

If you don’t have 25 minutes, load the first clip at CBS (it’s in two parts) and skip ahead to seven minutes in. That picks up with Wuterich talking about the white car filled with young Iraqi men that he noticed right after the roadside bomb went off. It’s their killings, not the house-to-house clearings that came later, that investigators have said are the most incriminating. Wuterich claims he suspected them of having planted the IED and shot them as they ran away, but one Marine and an Iraqi soldier who were there say that the five were simply standing by the car in a line when he gunned them down. CBS showed a photo of the bodies last night, which to my knowledge is the first time it’s ever been published. I screencapped it for posterity.

Interesting fact drawn out by Pelley that I hadn’t known before: Wuterich had never seen combat until this incident. It was the first attack on his unit in his first deployment.

Update: Uncle Jimbo at Blackfive watched the interview too and sees bad days ahead for Wuterich. Not because of the shootings of the Iraqis in the car but because of the assault on the first house:

The mistake he made was assaulting the first house without being certain that is where the fire they took came from. Once the decision was made that those buildings represented the threat they were facing, the rest of the actions they took were brutal but proper. If Wuterich’s story is true he may be guilty of a horrendous decision to assault the first building, and that may be Dereliction of Duty, but it is not Murder.

Wuterich describes the assault at the beginning of the second clip at CBSNews.

Jason, what did you understand the ROE to be when entering a building/room with suspected enemy inside?

They were pretty loose, to be honest. Fighting in a MOUT situation is pretty hectic so you can’t really enact harsh control measures. You were still supposed to make sure you acquired a ‘legal’ target before firing. Other than that, if you thought there were noncombatants in a house you couldn’t use frags.

To those posters here questioning his innocence, THIS IS A WAR, don’t forget that. The condescending attitude of this talking head is infuriating, he talks as if he was there and witnessed it. This marine is being hung out to dry in the name of appeasment of the leftist anti-war crowd. I fully support our men and women in uniform, it is because of them that we haven’t had another 9-11 YET.

Haditha Marine Sergeant Frank Wuterich’s trial may be months away, but last night ’60 Minutes’ reporter Scott Pelley decided to court
martial him on national television. It was one of the most outrageous displays of media bias ever. In case your memory needs refreshing, the Haditha incident was a situation in Iraq where a group of Marines, led by Wuterich, cleared a house that they thought was being used by insurgents. It turns out it was occupied by several women and children and all were killed. They’ve been charged with murder and their trial is expected later this year.

Wuterich says he’s innocent. That the way he cleared that house was consistent with his training and that if Marines start asking before they shoot, they die. That’s war…that’s how it works. People die…and sometimes those people are innocent. It’s called collateral damage. So anyway, all of this wasn’t enough for the smarmy, condescending Scott Pelley on ’60 Minutes’ last night. He interviewed Wuterich and naturally, immediately took the side of the enemy.

Pelley called it a massacre…wrong. A massacre would be walking into a house, ordering everybody out, and shooting them in the head. This was a house-clearing operation, something that’s done to root out insurgents in Iraq everyday. But Pelley continued his interrogation of the 25-year-old Wuterich…questioning his actions and mocking him because he hadn’t seen combat prior to Haditha.

Ironically, with Pelley’s interview..he may have created quite a bit of sympathy for Frank Wuterich. Just what we expect from the mainstream media…always blame America first.

Regardless of the marine’s innocence or guilt, CBS is guilty here of exploiting an unfortunate incident in the war as anti-US military propaganda for the enemy. That’s where people should be looking at jail time, in my book.

Just how many troop-bashing segments are enough for the 60 minutes crew? It’s become an endless cycle of questioning and condemnation, to the point where it makes me ill. Since the surge is rendering improvements on the ground in Baghdad, CBS felt their perspective of failure would be challenged by any good news. To counter this, CBS took the route of reminding everyone we’re still the bad guys in this battle by revisiting a tragic incident that happened long ago.

This guy Pelley should be horsewhipped for his brazen, better-than-thow tonguelashing of young Wuterich. Wuterich doesn’t have a month’s preparation time to decide his next move like Pelley does, he has split seconds.

This segment will be played over and over again at Al Jazeera and every other Arab station who wants to portray the U.S. as the evil one in this fight. Nice work CBS, allies of the terrorist community.

At first I thought I was watching a clip of “To Catch a Predator”, which no doubt was precisely the portrayal CBS wanted to deliver to it’s audience.

To those posters here questioning his innocence, THIS IS A WAR, don’t forget that

Yes, this is war, but to have cohesive fighting unit you need rules. If the ROE were not followed then those who do not follow orders need to be punished.

Please understand I feel the ROE suck and need to be changed. We fight with our hands tied and will never win another land war unless we give more power to the boots on the ground. You can not win a war run by sissies in Wussington D.C.

Once agains, 60 Minutes does a “Rather.” Boortz is exactly right on that.

Given 60 Minutes’ use of forged documents in trying to “get BOOOSH!” in 2004, given their attempt to fake a scandal involving so-called “missing munitions” in October 2004, and given their wide-open anti-war, anti-military, anti-Bush bias, DID ANY OF YOU EXPECT ANYTHING DIFFERENT?

I am no professional film editor. But I know that videos can be edited to convey anything you want them to. I know that CBS can make Wuterich say anything they want him to say, or make it seem so on tape.

Those of you condemning Wuterich based upon this interview, ought to keep in mind that he is INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY in a COURT, not on 60 minutes.

This segment will be played over and over again at Al Jazeera and every other Arab station who wants to portray the U.S. as the evil one in this fight. Nice work CBS, allies of the terrorist community.

In law, treason is the crime of disloyalty to one’s nation. A person who betrays the nation of their citizenship and/or reneges on an oath of loyalty and in some way willfully cooperates with an enemy, is considered to be a traitor. Oran’s Dictionary of the Law (1983) defines treason as: “…[a]…citizen’s actions to help a foreign government overthrow, make war against, or seriously injure the [parent nation].”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitor

I watched it or rather I watched most of it. I got so angry and started hollering at the TV that my wife turned the channel. That idjit reporter acted like Sgt Wuetrich was wearing a badge and was serving a restraining order or something. That pompous, self righteous, ignoramious reporter wanted to sound so high and mighty well here is a test. Go embed with some troops and then volunteer to be the first to go through a doorway. He even showed footage of what happened in Fallujah, that was witnessed by a couple of the Marines in Wuetrich’s squad where a Marine got killed entering a room. Sorry they are soldiers not social workers. You don’t want them fight like they were trained to, then maybe it is time to get them the hell out of there because personally I am getting sick and tired of seeing so many of them put on trial.
I have nastier things to say but I will leave it at that.

I wonder what is worse in this scum bag reporters mind? The purposeful killings of 65,000 japanese civilians during the politically correct WWII or the accidental killing of civilians in the politically incorrect war against terror?

I haven’t watched the clip, and I’m not going to. I haven’t been able to watch MSM news coverage, except Fox, since 9/11. I am so angry about the lying, traitorous, propagandistic attempts to bring low my country that I literally am sickened if I catch a glimpse of these asshats on my tube.

Scott Pelley is a disgusting human-being. That was the most blatantly biased and disengenous interviews I have ever seen given to a man who had seen his fellow Marine cut in half. Mistakes were obviously made, but premediated “murder” of women and children?!! Give me a break!

Wuterich looks like a Man who is sorry his actions led to innocent deaths, but is assured that he made the only decisions he could have to protect his Men. I think he will do fine in court.

Another nail in the MSMs coffin as far as I’m concerned. The day a nuclear weapon goes off in the US after the Patriot Act has been repealed, Muslims have been given special privileges to make us all suffer at their whims, and sharia law becomes the order of the day in NYC, will be the day it would not be wise to be a MSM reporter. Giving aid and comfort to the enemy who just killed 4 million of your fellow neighbors, friends, sons and daughters won’t get you a cup of coffee as a reporter if you are recognized on the street as someone who supported jihadists before the massacre. Mr. Pelley should consider where he lives and whom he is supposed to be reporting to.

Pray this man finds peace and pray that the prosecutor has the same talents as OJ’s and Blake’s. I don’t condone wanton murder….but I don’t believe in railroading a scared man with a gun we sent out to shoot terrorists. I don’t have all the answers but one of them isn’t putting this man in prison.

Thw whole thing with this Haditha incident is that there is nobody that can say for sure who killed those civillians. Some may have been killed by the Marines but I am willing to bet a dime to a doughnut that some, if not all of them were killed by the retreating jihadists. It is a tactic they used in Fallujah, except there they normally had them chained to the floor or the wall making it harder to deny.
Some of them may have been killed by the grenades thrown into the room, but what I was getting so pissed about was the way in which the interviewer was asking the questions. He was not worried about the sargeants’ psyche at all. Hell if he would have wound up in a rubber room taking all kinds of drugs 60 Minutes would have had a ratings bonanza.
I wish these reporters had questioned OJ in this manner, and maybe 50% of this country wouldn’t think he was innocent. But what am I thinking after seeing puff piece after puff piece done with some of the most brutal dictators alive who are all just “misunderstood”.
Hang the American but let’s not be so hasty to judge those who only want to kill us.

The thing about cases like this is that you never know for sure so long as nobody claims someone else did it or there are no witnesses, which is why I think they’ll get off unless someone claims they know who killed someone.

They will not get off. Too much hate in this country for itself. This men will be forgotten five minutes after the verdict is read. Fonda and Soros and Hagel will have a cluster fark just to celebrate.

The thing about cases like this is that you never know for sure so long as nobody claims someone else did it or there are no witnesses, which is why I think they’ll get off unless someone claims they know who killed someone.

Nonfactor on March 19, 2007 at 2:56 PM

sgt Wuetrich has several things working against him.
1) Senator Murtha wants his hide on the wall of his office
2) There is a video that was shot by a purported “human rights” group, which consisted of one guy with a dubious past.
3) There is testimony from a local doctor pointing the finger at the Marines
4) The bodies were buried and no exhumation was allowed to determine cause of death.

Anyone who is already pissed off enough, go back to the cbs site and watch the video “Pelley’s Reporter’s Notebook”.

This jerk-off admits that the situation in Haditha was the most hostile place in Iraq towards the Marines. Watching him contort his face in disgust was a act. He is well aware that the Marines were acting completely appropriately.

I always write in to the networks, affiliates and the websites after shows like this. It may not ever do any good. But if eventually that reporter gets grief for the leaning way he interviews, then maybe one day I’ll feel better for having done it.

What an arrogant, rude, dishonest, biased, venomous, crude person Scott Pelley reveals himself to be. He’s working on the angle that his listeners believe the Marines to be evil murderers and he is playing it up to the hilt! How disingenuous!

Sadly, this line of performance will work on the unwashed masses, the less than bright fellow citizens, and they will swallow Pelley’s vitriolic pabulum hook, line, and sinker!

Scott Pelley is only thinking about repeating Vietnam and being able to claim that he was involved in breaking the Iraq “My Lai” story.

Scott Pelley and the rest of CBS News associated with Pelley’s hit piece deserve a special place in hell where they assaulted by sword wielding beheading terrorists and no U.S. Marines are around to protect them.

War needs to be declared on the anti-military, anti-American left wing partisan “mainstream media.” It is a curse on America.

The mistake he made was assaulting the first house without being certain that is where the fire they took came from. Once the decision was made that those buildings represented the threat they were facing, the rest of the actions they took were brutal but proper. If Wuterich’s story is true he may be guilty of a horrendous decision to assault the first building, and that may be Dereliction of Duty, but it is not Murder.

This is ridiculous, no matter who said it. If utterly laying waste to whomever and whatever seems to be a deadly threat is immoral, then fvck morality. Force and fraud are plainly the virtues of war, and I despise wartime moralists, unless they’re frauds.

I can’t believe that anybody on Staff Sgt. Wuterich’s side thought this would be anything other than a hatchet job. The enemedia are a willing fifth column for those who hate us and want to destroy us–the last thing 60 Minutes was going to do was give him a sympathetic interview. Not that Wuterich and his co-defendants had much chance of a fair trial anyway. Not after that sh*tbag Murtha shot off his fat mouth and publicly declared them guilty before the investigation was even complete, claiming that he got his information from the Commandant of the Marine Corps himself.

It would seem that Wuterich (and a lot of you apparently) have a lot more class than I do. I have to say, when that bastard made that comment about ‘You would have murdered those children again?!’, I would have knocked his teeth out.

Besides, I’m still not all that certain that the people that died were all that innocent. I do still remember the story where they talked to the kid that survived. She mentioned that she, and presumably her family, knew that the bomb was there, and they didn’t warn anyone. Maybe I’m funny that way, but in my mind, if you know something is there, and you don’t warn the good guys, then you are not innocent.

Scott Pelley is just but one example of the low life scum that inhabit the halls of the MSM. I was so angry watching this hit job that I wanted to do some serious damage to my TV.

The original interview took place in October 2005 and since that time, the NCIS 13,000 page report has been release disputing many of the allegations made by the traitorous Scott Pelley.

How convenient that CBS chose to leave the new information out of the interview. Like the fact they were receiving fire from the house that they cleared:

(Scroll down to the comment by Darryl Sharratt)“The WaPost claims to have a copy of the 13,000 page NCIS report. In a Jan 6, 2007 article ‘Death in Haditha’ Josh White uses statements from the NCIS report. In this article he identifies a Navy Corpsman who had bullets striking at his feet while he was attending the wounded, fire was coming from the direction of the white vehicle he stated. A Marine L/Cpl saw men dressed in black firing from the roof of the 1st house targeted. The QRF under the command of Kallop was receiving fire the minute they arrived on the scene. The interview provides the first evidence that an officer ordered the attack. Then the strongest testimony–Mashoot, an Iraqi Army Sgt, who was imbedded with the marines testified “he thought the attack on the houses was warranted because the entire convoy was TAKING FIRE.”

Scott Pelley is a POS and there is a special place in hell reserved for the likes of him. He had no intention or reporting the facts about this case.

So, you’re trying to make your case and put yourself in a favorable light publicly, so you go on — — — 60 minutes?

What the hell is wrong with the people who are supposed to be looking out for this kid, such as his lawyers and his superiors in the Corps? It’s getting to the point where I don’t know who disgusts me more — media scum like Pelley, Democrats, liberals and so on, or the pathetic gutless simps who are supposed to be the ones on our side.

Let me get this straight….. John Kerry admits to -and gives a subordinate an 8 mm camera in order to record his murdering of an unarmed, young Vietnamese boy, in a loin cloth who was running from the scene of a fire fight that occurred 15 minutes before he arrived ashore,… and he gets a bronze star.

This poor shmuck drops a few questionable characters located in an area from which he was receiving incoming fire,in the heat of battle, and he faces the brig. God help us.

Alden Pyle, the difference is that John Kerry is anti-war, while Wuterich is anti-terrorist. The media knows the difference, and they have chosen sides. Somebody is going to have to pay for what the media is doing to us and to those who protect us. I hope someone is keeping an archive of things like this, for use when people finally get tired of being sold down the river by these scum.